The Labyrinth was built, according to Greek myth, to house the Minotaur. The bull-headed man-beast was too large and powerful, too uncontrollable, to be allowed to roam free; also, he ate human flesh, which is problematic.

Why didn’t King Minos of Crete just kill the Minotaur, you might ask? Well, because the Minotaur was his son. His step-son, actually, but since the existence of the Minotaur was his fault, I think he should get credit for parentage. (Also it’s named after him — Minotaur is derived from “Minos’s bull” in Greek.) The Minotaur was the child of Minos’s wife Pasiphae and the snow-white bull which Poseidon gave to Minos as a sign of divine favor, which Minos was supposed to sacrifice but which he decided he wanted to keep; so Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with said bull — and when a bull and a woman love each other very much…

The point is, Minos constructed this enormous, elaborate edifice, this institution, in order to keep his problematic child alive, but also contained.

And that’s the same reason why we have schools.

Sorry: too far?

By which I mean: did I start too far afield with this analogy?

And also: am I going too far by comparing the youth of today to the man-eating monster of Greek myth?

I don’t think I am (At least not the second kind of too far; the first is really your subjective opinion, but I’ll come back to that, too): because after all, the school system is an unbelievably and appallingly large and elaborate maze, one that even the makers would be largely unable to work their way through (Daedalus, the genius artificer who built the Labyrinth, was barely able to escape it himself; and similarly, there’s not an educator alive today who could handle going back through K-12 schooling. Even if we just did Senior year, I would flunk every math class and get into constant fights with my English teachers when they marked my essays down for being too long. As if that’s even a thing!). A maze which people get lost in, one into which we push a new set of “tributes” every year, where they are devoured by the monster at the heart of the system. And that monster — whom we love — is not one we are willing to destroy or to sacrifice, and so we do whatever we have to in order to keep it alive: but we don’t always provide it with what it really needs to thrive; rather, we tend to put it away where we can’t see it, but we know it’s there and safe. And we maybe just hope that it will figure out its own way to, y’know, be okay.

It works, doesn’t it?

Hold on, hold on: I don’t have to say that the Minotaur is children. The beast at the heart of the maze of education is the result of a gift that was granted us, but which we were given for a specific use or purpose, and which we turned into a selfishly, greedily coveted possession instead: a choice that caused far greater problems than what we might have gained from keeping it for our own amusement. The educational system is the Minotaur. It was created (By us, not by the gods — but really, what’s the difference?) for a specific purpose: to prepare children to be better adults. But we refused to give it up, meaning use it, for just that purpose (Maybe because it would have meant losing control of it?) and instead kept it, clung to it, which led to the destruction of every good aspect of it; and here I’m talking about the elements of education which we refuse utterly to let go of, keeping them preserved long past their usefulness, because of some sentimental attachment to them: things like the Pledge of Allegiance, or classes divided by year of birth, or summer vacation.

It works. You know it does. (If it didn’t, you wouldn’t still be reading this.)

To come back to the thread I left hanging earlier (which may lead us out of this maze, like Theseus), I don’t think I’ve gone too far afield in producing this analogy and then trying to find various places where it can fit because: looking from the ancient Greek side, that is the idea of a myth: a story that is supposed to help make sense of the human experience, usually through a metaphorical substitution of divinity and supernatural power for realities we can’t understand. Our education system as a whole is certainly a reality we can’t understand. I would argue that children are, as well. And from our side, analogies like this are not necessarily intended to define every single aspect of the object being analogized: but merely to offer some insight into it, some new perspective on it.

I bet you’ve never been asked to think of the Cretan Labyrinth as a metaphor for the K-12 education system. And I will bet double or nothing that nobody has ever compared children to the minotaur before.

What do you think, though? Is it accurate? Even a little?

If it is a little accurate (And you know it is), then the analogy succeeded.

And here’s the rub: that analogy’s success depends on you knowing at least three different otherwise useless sets of information and skills: Greek mythology; abstract metaphor/analogy; and the ability to analyze both sides of an analogy and recognize parallels, points of comparison.

If it worked, you learned all that in school. K-12, almost certainly, though it may have been reinforced in college. But Greek mythology came into school for me around 3rd grade; analogies were middle school as a concept, and all the way back to kindergarten as a presence (Because the “kindergarten,” after all, is not actually a garden that grows children) Analyzing and finding points of comparison was high school, I assume, though I don’t remember specifically; but since I teach it, I assume it was taught to me, and somewhere around the same time. Probably in my high school English class. Though metaphor and analogy are something that shows up in most subjects, because it (Using a concrete object to represent an abstract idea, which is the essence of metaphor; using a familiar object to represent an unfamiliar one is the basis of analogy) is one of the most useful conceptual frameworks in life.

And that’s the point.

I wanted today (Okay, I wanted yesterday, but I had to spend the whole day yesterday grading because it takes me a long time to read essays, and also I had to get my hair cut. So it’s today. And maybe tomorrow, if I don’t hurry up and wrap this up.) to discuss the value of school as an institution: is there a reason, in a world of constant access to limitless information, to have school? A school that creates a certain uniformity, which replaces the freedom of childhood with the structure — and therefore the conformity — of early adulthood? My students are very clear that they think there is little value in school today: they think they should be free to learn what they want and only what they want. To choose all of their classes, based on what they are interested in and what they believe they need, and to discard all others that are not interesting or needed, in their minds. Press them on this, and they will admit, first, that given perfect freedom of choice for studies, they would waste most of their time (I certainly would have); and second, there may be some value in the curriculum somewhere; but basically, they want to be set free to do what they want, and not told what they need, especially when so much of what we tell them they need is actually useless in their eyes.

Like a bigass maze meant to contain just one creature.

And that is not something I would argue with: there is an enormous amount of waste in the school system, as there is in any large bureaucracy, especially an old and established one. That’s the Labyrinth. And I don’t think it’s a good thing, not in every specific twist and turn, every single nook and cranny.

But I do think the structure is necessary, if we want to contain the beast within. Since we aren’t willing to kill it.

We had an opportunity to see what that beast would do, given its freedom: because school was closed for a while, back there. A few months in some cases; just about two years, in others. The Labyrinth got turned off, and the Minotaur was asked to put on this headset and sit in front of this screen while we showed him pictures of the Labyrinth, and demanded he pretend he was still wandering inside it, perfectly contained.

Instead he just played video games. (Mostly Minecraft, ironically, but hey, it’s a great game.)

There are a number of problems with the school system. The brick and mortar schools themselves are obscenely expensive to build and maintain. One could argue (though I would argue back) that the system which places large numbers of children into essentially unguarded locations creates a vulnerability that could be and has been exploited by monsters who would harm children — and here I’m not making a forced analogy about the Minotaur, I’m talking about the inhuman bastards at Sandy Hook and Uvalde. Apart from that, schools are certainly vectors for disease, as we know from the last three years of COVID and generations’ worth of flu before that. The school building creates the opportunity (and perhaps the certainty) of bullying and abuse so severe that it might have been the cause of other atrocities like Columbine, not to mention the countless suicides that are the second leading cause of death among Americans aged 15-24. And that’s not even mentioning the curriculum, which is also problematic, and is in some ways more the aspect of the system I’m talking about here. Certainly more labyrinthine and Byzantine.

The basic problem with all of it is efficiency. The only way public school makes sense is if one teacher can provide education to multiple students. Otherwise we’re all just tutors for single children, and we might as well just homeschool everyone, the way people raised their kids for millennia, with parents (And extended family members, too) teaching their own children how to live, except for rich people who hired surrogates so they wouldn’t have to deal with it. But no two children are alike: no two children have just the same interests, aptitudes, or future needs. So by trying to increase the efficiency of education so that fewer adults can provide it to more children, we immediately and inevitably lose some individuality. And the more we try to standardize it, the more we try to make it efficient in terms of achieving repeatable, preferred outcomes for all inputs (Students, that is), the more individuality we lose — and since that, the individuality we ruin by trying to create efficiency, is also students, the system becomes its own problem. The efficiency creates its own inefficiency. We harm students in trying to help students.

And if that ain’t exactly like the Labyrinth, I don’t know a bull’s head from a hole in the ground.

But here’s the thing: for all its problems, the Labyrinth is a good solution. Because it works: it keeps the Minotaur alive, and it prevents it from destroying Minos’s people. It’s not efficient, and it’s not kind, and it necessitates other terrible things like sacrificing people (whom Minos is more willing to sacrifice, because he loves the Minotaur but he doesn’t love the fourteen youths sent every year from Athens) in order to feed the one he’s not willing to sacrifice. An essentially insoluble problem is solved.

Education of an entire population is an insoluble problem, for exactly the reason I said above: we can’t hope to provide every child with what they need. We just can’t. And the harder we try, the worse it will get.

But we also can’t give it up. We can’t let the Minotaur — or if you’re tired of the analogy, the children — just run around on their own. There would be too much destruction. Put more realistically, learning everything you need to know on your own is simply not possible for any but the most self-sufficient geniuses. We all need someone to show us how it works, and then, more importantly, to give us feedback on what went wrong when we tried it ourselves. We need it. Can’t live without it. Can’t learn without it, that is — and in this modern world, education is life. Straight up. Not even a metaphor: education is life.

So that’s why education as a system, as an enormous and expensive and unwieldy and inefficient and often abusive and insensitive and even violent and dangerous system, is necessary. Because our people need to learn how to do things: how to read, how to write, how to do math, how to analyze and interpret and connect and compare and contrast. We also need to learn how to work together, how to help each other, how to ask for what we need and refuse what we don’t; and then how to suffer through being forced to do what we don’t need or want, anyway. All of that is important. And all of it comes from school. That’s not all that comes from school, and a lot of what comes from school is shit; but — we get what we need from school, as well. Most of us. Most of what we need.

And we get some stuff we may not know we need. That’s the problem with letting students decide on their own everything they need to learn for their future: how the hell do they know what they’ll need for their future? You never know when you are young what you may need when you are older. Like algebra. Or chemistry. Or how to make analogies. You never know when you will need to understand when some wackadoo tries to turn some freaky Greek myth into something that is supposed to give insight into the modern world. Literally no way you could have predicted that — and if you were asked when you were a teenager, you never would have taken a class that would have helped you understand this ridiculous post. And hey, maybe you don’t need to understand this post, or my analogies, ever.

But if you couldn’t: wouldn’t you have missed an opportunity here? Wouldn’t you be lost?

Here. Take this thread. It’ll show you the way out.

But only after you go all the way in to the heart of the maze, and fight for your life against what you find there.

Good luck. I’ll be here when you come back out.

(And also, I can’t talk this much about Labyrinths without making this reference, too. Which might be an even better one, since the Goblin King takes a child into the heart of the Labyrinth…)